Archive | Startups

This is a story about My Underwear. Not my underwear — but “My Underwear” — the mobile game for children from my old game studio. More importantly, it’s about the hard work of building accessible products, about finding and fuelling previously unreachable audiences (niche markets on the internet), and ultimately about creating joy for people using our products […]

Alban is a serial entrepreneur and, while his first two companies didn’t have a long life, his 2014 launch of AlbanFootball has performed much better, currently shipping products to more than 30 countries. In true startup fashion it started from a problem: Football fans – Albanian football fans specifically – didn’t have a place to easily buy the merchandise of […]

It’s that time of the year again. You need to set your team’s OKRs (objectives and key results) for the next quarter. What should go in there? What shouldn’t? What are you going to focus on? Here’s a quick look behind the curtain at what we’ve learned while setting them and making it effective at […]

Building hardware products presents a set of unique challenges and Kristoffer Lawson, founder and CEO of Solu, found it all the more interesting coming to hardware from his background in software engineering. While it certainly takes more time to build and prototype products in hardware, the process is getting faster and the costs continue to fall. Not […]

This is the third (and final) part in a series of blog posts documenting our path to launching our SaaS product, Screenful. We have now happily launched our product and we’re ready to share the lessons we learned along the way. If you missed them, catch Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. When it came to our […]

This is the second part in the series of blog posts documenting our path to launching a SaaS product. The first part of this series is available here: Part 1 – Launching a B2B SaaS product Now that we’re getting closer to our launch date, we’re busy preparing. For us, that means coding, design work, documentation, and generally […]

“If software is eating the world, then product managers are setting the menu”. Des Traynor, co-founder of customer communication platform Intercom, talks about how to create simple, yet brilliant products. He asks us to consider where products come from and how they are made, arguing that a product manager should know where the product stops […]

Why is it that some products take off while others fall flat? There are many tactical reasons we can point to such as timing, competition, or product-market fit. Fundamentally though, there is one consistent truth regardless of the reason we may determine: some products create value for the market they’re serving, and some simply do […]

Thou shall not say “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” This was among the lessons we learned from Dave Wascha, Chief Product Officer at Moo.com, at ProductTank March. As Dave said, “This is the most scary, terrifying, insidious thing we face as product managers, and the older you get the more baggage you […]

I built the same product three times. It wasn’t an act of insanity. It was my way to get my product ready in three weeks. Before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. It was the 1st of March 2013 and I’d just left my job as CIO at one of the UK’s […]